• Friday, March 29, 2024
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The forgotten dimension of diversity

The forgotten dimension of diversity

Ionce had a student in my executive education class, a managing director at a global bank, who told a heart-rending story of her first steps toward professional success. As a teenager she had become a mother, and to make ends meet she’d worked cleaning offices. Even though she was dealing with substantial hardship at home, she always brought a spark to her work, and soon she caught the attention of a manager at the bank. Sensing her potential, the manager encouraged her to apply for an entry-level white-collar job at the bank and to pursue training in finance. By the time she and I met, she held a top job negotiating debt deals and was working alongside colleagues who had started in positions right out of elite universities.

The work she was doing required grit, courage and a deep human understanding — qualities that I venture are more common among the stars of custodial crews than among the middling members of junior-analyst groups hired each year out of universities. Unfortunately, her story is the exception, not the rule, as I’ve learned through working with companies and researching the role of lower social-class origins on behaviors and outcomes at work.

When I refer to people of lower social-class origins, I mean those who through the conditions of birth and upbringing have had relatively less access to money, to contacts who promote their upward mobility and to the cultural knowhow necessary to get ahead in schools and companies. Those of us who study social class origins often measure them along several dimensions: family income during early years, parents’ level of education and parents’ occupations.

A person’s social class origins leave a cultural imprint that has a lasting effect, even if the individual gains money or status later in life. In recent research, my colleague Jean Oh and I found that U.S. workers from lower social-class origins are 32% less likely to become managers than are people from higher origins. This disadvantage prevails in every major economy in the world.

We’ve learned a good deal in recent years about how social class inequities affect access to jobs and promotions, but what we’ve learned is still mostly ignored by U.S. companies — even those celebrated for their diversity and inclusion efforts (also known as DIE). Companies may feel daunted by the prospect of another battle to fight, but they need not. By attending to social class disadvantage, they reinforce their efforts to combat other forms of disadvantage. As the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out, racial disadvantages in particular are intertwined with social class disadvantage in such a way that remediation of the former is impossible without attention to the latter.

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In this article, I’ll detail examples of policies and practices that counteract class disadvantage by recruiting, including, developing and promoting individuals from lower socialclass origins. Here are a few ways to get started.

— ADD SOCIAL CLASS TO YOUR DIE GOALS: Many companies have successfully increased the representation of women and racial minorities in their managerial ranks by setting specific DIE goals, backing them up with programs and holding themselves accountable for results. The same approach works for social class. Consider PWC, which in 2017 created a team dedicated to improving social mobility in its workforce; its goal was to apply the same level of attention to the disadvantages of social class that it was already applying to those of gender, ethnicity and race. The company now has a 1,000-member social-mobility support group that facilitates outreach to students from lower social-class origins.

— PUSH BACK AGAINST DEGREE INFLATION: A recent study found that 67% of job postings for “production worker supervisor” in the United States required a bachelor’s degree or higher, even though only 16% of the people who already held the title had that qualification. By demanding an educational credential that was not necessary for performing the job, recruiters were exacerbating social class disadvantage. In the U.K., Ernst & Young has eliminated the requirement of a degree as a qualification for joining the firm, after finding that success at a university has no relationship to achieving professional certifications. A better approach, the firm concluded, would be to measure capabilities directly in the recruiting process through formal tests and assessments.

— PROMOTE THE BEST CANDIDATES FROM EVERY DEPARTMENT: Departments in organizations tend to be stratified according to social class: People with higher origins cluster in high-status departments; those with lower origins work in less-visible groups. Because companies often seek candidates for managerial roles from only a handful of departments, the odds are stacked against some of the best candidates simply because they work in the wrong place. Walmart, where 75% of today’s salaried store managers began as hourly associates, seeks out leadership talent in overlooked places. The company provides developmental training in leadership and management to hourly employees who have moved into supervisory roles.

— FACE UP TO THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF RACE AND SOCIAL CLASS: Working with data from the General Social Survey, a comprehensive, representative survey that has been conducted in the United States since 1972, I’ve found that for workers from higher socialclass origins, race is not a factor in determining who becomes a manager. However, Blacks from lower-class origins are substantially less likely than whites with similar backgrounds to become managers. Understanding this interdependence is fundamental to remedying social class disadvantage. To the extent that race-based interventions favor Black workers from higher social-class origins, they do little or nothing to resolve the class disadvantage in management. For example, although historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUS, are unusually diverse in terms of their students’ social class origins, half their students come from the middle class or higher. A company recruiting on those campuses might make no hires from among students with lower social-class origins unless they deliberately attend to social class bias in their recruiting as well. That’s what Jpmorgan Chase does in its Advancing Black Pathways program, which gives special attention to firstgeneration and low-income students in the recruiting it does at HBCUS.

— BUILD A COHESIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: Companies that hire with cultural fit in mind can significantly improve employee commitment, satisfaction and motivation. Hiring for cultural fit, however, too often consists of hiring employees who share managers’ personal interests or backgrounds — a practice that human resources directors increasingly denounce because it can be used to exclude disadvantaged groups. Airbnb has shown that a rigorous evaluation of fit can produce a strong organizational culture without allowing discriminatory biases to hold sway. It has established guardrails against personal bias in its hiring process, for example, by identifying the competencies and attributes required for each position.

In recent decades, companies have focused on building programs that improve the representation of women and racial minorities in management. That work demonstrates that the barriers to inclusion and equity are surmountable. Given the significant number of people from lower social classes in the American workforce, I estimate that if we were to resolve the problem, we might increase the supply of capable managers by a third. The potential rewards are enormous.